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The Official Response Begins

Harper's Magazine (Online)by Scott HortonJanuary 19, 2010

When a cover-up is exposed, nothing is more telling than
the first reactions from those who are involved. Do they maintain their
stories and face potentially aggravated consequences? Or do they simply
remain silent? In making this choice, they often telegraph the depth of
their anxiety and concern.

Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I focused on the first responses to “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides.’”
Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the former commander at Camp America, had
sent an email to the Associated Press, the text of which AP confirmed
to me, in which he said he would have to get clearance from the Defense
Department to speak, but then stated:

This blatant misrepresentation of the truth
infuriates me. I don’t know who Sgt. Hickman is, but he is only trying
to be a spotlight ranger. He knows nothing about what transpired in
Camp 1, or our medical facility. I do, I was there.

This statement merits closer inspection. The first sentence
is a classic nondenial denial. It appears on the surface to deny part
of the account, but in fact denies nothing. Bumgarner needs to state
specifically what allegations he considers inaccurate. His failure to
do so is telling.

The second statement is an attempt to frame the conflict in
terms of a controversy between Sergeant Hickman and himself, which he
leads into by saying he doesn’t even know who Hickman is. That
statement is demonstrably false. As we confirmed with Defense
Department records, Bumgarner recommended Hickman for a medal (shown
below) based on his cool-headed approach to defusing a prison riot on
May 18, 2006. Moreover, Hickman was selected as NCO of the Quarter at
Guantánamo, a fact the camp commander would certainly have known at the
time. In any case, the key points in which Bumgarner figures do not
rest on Hickman’s accounts alone—they are corroborated by a series of
additional witnesses, as well as by published accounts in which
Bumgarner himself is extensively quoted.

Hickman’s Army Commendation Medal certificate, signed by Baumgarner

The third statement presents Bumgarner with even more
serious problems. He denies that Hickman was present or has knowledge
of what transpired at Camp 1 and the detainee clinic on the night of
June 9. “I was there,” he says. Let’s be very clear about this: Either
Bumgarner lied in a formal statement to NCIS, or he lied to AP. In his
formal account, Bumgarner addressed this point directly. “On the night
of 09JUN06, I was not in the camp,” he writes, “I had spent the evening
at Admiral Harris’s house.” (This can be found on pp. 1059-60 of the
NCIS evidence file, and can be examined here
[PDF, 1.1M] on page 6 of the original document.) This account matches
the recollection of other witnesses cited in Admiral Harris’s AR 15-6
statement, especially the statements beginning at p. 118. In all these
accounts, Colonel Bumgarner does not arrive at the camp until 12:48
a.m. on the morning of June 10. The operative events of the narrative
furnished by the guards occurred between 7:00 p.m. and midnight—long
before Bumgarner’s arrival on the scene.

The Justice Department response is also informative. It was
confronted with several allegations: that the FBI had been involved in
a cover-up from the first days after the deaths, launching a raid
designed to intimidate witnesses from speaking openly; that the Justice
Department may have made repeated misleading statements to federal
judge James Robertson in furtherance of the cover-up; and that the
Department claimed to have concluded its investigation into Hickman’s
story before contacting witnesses who would have, and did, corroborate it.

The Justice Department had no response to any of these
serious allegations. Instead, in a January 18 e-mail, department
spokesman Laura Sweeny claimed that two of the witnesses interviewed by
the department had misremembered the names of the lawyers present at
those meetings. She refused to address any of the other allegations in
the article. Instead, she insisted that I note that Justice had
“conducted a thorough inquiry into this matter, carefully examined the
allegations, found no evidence of wrongdoing and subsequently closed
the matter.” And then she said, as she had when I contacted her in
reporting the story, that she would not arrange an interview with any
of the officials involved in the matter.

This is all classic misdirection, an attempt to make the
story not about the crimes at Guantánamo but the minutes of meetings in
Baltimore and Columbia. Still, the fact that the Justice Department is
unwilling to say who was at these brief interviews speaks volumes. It
does not deny that the interviews occurred, nor that the descriptions
of the meetings are otherwise accurate, nor even that the lawyers
identified were in fact involved in the investigation. It simply
insists that the team conducting these interviews not be identified.

Of course, this adamant insistence on official anonymity
does nothing to dispel the accusation of cover-up. Just the opposite:
it suggests that the lawyers and FBI agents involved quite urgently
wish not to have their names associated with it. And who could blame
them?